Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/175

Rh reflected thence disclosed the furniture indispensable for man's dual existence: a narrow bed, from beneath which the rim of a bath protruded; the table, and a couple of chairs. The walls were unadorned, the boards were bare.

The appearance of Henry Longton's volume had been the literary event of a season. The new man had been recognised as standing in a solitude unapproachable by the twittering mob of a prolific generation. A great poet, who chanced to be also himself a great critic, had dared to stake his reputation upon the future of the new Immortal. And so for a while he had lived in a hashish dream of exultation. He knew his achievements to be high; and as he wandered by day or night through howling thoroughfares, lonely amid the turgid waves of half-evolved humanity, he forgot the cruel side of life, and hugged himself in the warm cloak of flattering memories: the tumult of the traffic sounded drums and trumpets to his song.

Importunate came the hour when he must set forth once more to produce. A royalty on a limited edition may mount to a handsome dole of pocket-money, but it is not a chartered company. Longton's small capital had long since melted away; and he sat down, therefore, to write immortal verse for the liquidation of his landlady's bill.

The time had been when a mere act of attention sufficed to the erection of jewelled palaces from the piled-up treasures of his brain. Now, to his dismay, the most assiduous research could discover among the remnants nothing but the oft-rejected, the discoloured, and the flawed. The heavy wrath of the gods had fallen upon him, and he was dumb: he must betake himself to the merest hack-work of anonymous journalism; and the bitterest drop in the cup of this set-back was the reflection that the tide was ebbing for one whom nature had framed unfit to profit by its Rh